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Posted: 31 January 2006

Double top award for PhD student in UCD School of Geological Sciences

At the recent Palaeontological Association Annual Conference in Oxford, England, Maria McNamara, a PhD student in the Palaeobiology Research Group at the UCD School of Geological Sciences was awarded the President’s Prize for best paper by a researcher under the age of 30. This is the second time that Maria has won the award, which makes her one of only two people who have won the award twice in the last 49 years. Even more remarkably, Maria was awarded the prize for two consecutive papers she presented at the annual conference.

Her paper was on part of her research into the preservation of fossil amphibians in Tertiary lakes of Spain. The paper was co-authored by her supervisor Dr Patrick Orr and their collaborators from the University of Bristol (Dr Stuart Kearns,); from Spain (Luis Alcalá - Fundacion Conjunto Palaeontológico de Teruel, and Pere Anadón - CSIC-Barcelona) and from the American Museum of Natural History, New York (Enrique Peñalver-Mollá).

10 million year old frog, with its body outline preserved as a thin dark-colored film. Soft tissues such as these are rare in the fossil record; how they were preserved is under investigation by UCD palaeobiologists and their collaborators

Maria's research and other UCD Palaeobiology Group research will feature in forthcoming issues of the science magazine ‘Discover.’